First Look: Nissan NV200, the Next New York City Taxi

Nissan's NV200 cargo van won New York's Taxi of Tomorrow competition this year, and this week the automaker is showing off the customized taxi version in the Big Apple, replete with new interior features.

The Nissan NV200 won't be carrying cab passengers around the Big Apple for another two years, but New Yorkers are getting a first look inside the "Taxi of Tomorrow." This morning, in the shadow of the famed Flatiron Building, Nissan showed off the early version of the van's interior, outfitted with lots of extra conveniences for when the cabs go into service in October 2013.

Nissan has been selling the NV200 cargo van as a light commercial vehicle in Asia and Europe since 2009. The automaker built a specialized version to try to win the New York taxi contract, which it did in May. Most notably, the taxi version of the NV200 features a panoramic roof, which Joe Castelli, vice president for commercial vehicles and fleet at Nissan, trumpets as a way for riders to enjoy the New York skyline. Nissan boasts that the new cab is also outfitted with USB chargers for passengers who need to pump up their phone's battery life on the way to their next destination, space for upright luggage for four passengers, and no "hump" in the backseat floor—the bane of middle-seat riders everywhere.

Castelli tells PM that Nissan realized building a car to survive the urban warfare of New York taxi service would require some extra work and testing. So at its research base in Arizona, the automaker built what Castelli calls New York Avenue, a stretch of test track pocked with potholes, indentations, and rough transitions between sections of black and white pavement, to make sure the NV200 could survive.

"It's a great opportunity to build a vehicle from the ground up," Castelli says. If, for example, Nissan had offered the Altima to New York as the next cab, he says, the car company would have just said, "Well, here it is." But when he went through the first steps of bidding for the 10-year cab contract, the NV200 was still in development. "We wanted to get into this business, and we knew we had a car in the future," he says. That timeline allowed Nissan to build the prototype it hoped to sell to New York City at the same time it rolled out the standard NV200 on the streets of Japan and Europe.

Nissan will put about 2500 NV200 cabs in New York each year, until it turns over the entire New York taxi fleet of 13,000. (And, Nissan says, once the NV200 has replaced New York's Crown Vics, Ford Escapes, and other current taxis, the Nissan's smaller footprint will save 5 acres of space.) The commercial version of the NV200 will actually be available in the U.S. before the new New York taxis arrive, and Castelli tells PM that Nissan hopes to sell the cab version to other U.S. cities that need to freshen up their taxi fleets.